


By Candlelight

by QuillHeart



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, Coming Together Under Stress, Dark, Gen, Immediate aftermath of canon, Loss of Innocence, M/M, Nightmares, PTSD and trauma, Prophetic Dreams, Psychic Bond, Slow Burn, Worldbuilding, a whole lotta feels, i wrote this instead of working, the person who dies is not at all who you think it's gonna be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:06:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22948282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuillHeart/pseuds/QuillHeart
Summary: Everyone thought they could handle disaster recovery. Everyone was wrong.In the aftermath of the Parnassus's fall, Galo struggles to piece his life back together, and the strange, vivid dreams aren't helping. As nightmare after nightmare occurs in both waking hours and sleeping ones, he can't help but wonder where Lio Fotia has disappeared to, and if the two things are somehow connected.
Relationships: Kray Foresight & Galo Thymos, Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos, Lucia Fex & Galo Thymos
Comments: 22
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy I've had a crazy couple months. If you ever have to work three jobs while going to school half-time: Don't.
> 
> I told myself I wouldn't get in this situation again but, well...Wish me luck [sweats] And vote for candidates that believe in a living wage, maybe?
> 
> In the mean time, enjoy my bread and butter: A story of angst and perseverance with a side of tender caregiving. [clenches fist with manly tears]

Everyone thought they could handle disaster recovery.

Everyone was wrong.

Oh, Galo had heard the stories about the Great World Burn, from the old-timers. Ignis’s friends, who would come over to the station sometimes, chatting and joking and stuck in some dark place even all these years later.

He had heard it within the grizzled war stories and seen it in the haunted looks from the retired BR veterans on memorial holidays, as Galo stood, straight and tall and almost unaffected by the job, in his dress blues. The envy and the spite, that would flip on a dime away from jovial and welcoming, as the older men and women, just a little rattled, would gaze upon his youthful and unbroken soul and see something they had lost, but couldn’t afford to.

He hadn’t fully understood it, at the time. But as the ash fell, he was starting to see.

It seemed so simple on the surface: Rescue the trapped. Divide them into medical emergency levels at the appointed place and hand them off to the med team. Rinse, repeat, until your superiors told you the area was clear and sent you to another one.

Eventually, the story went, the smoke would clear and the sun would shine. You’d all go home heroes and the debris removal crews would arrive. One day, the site would be verdant and lush, complete with memorial park and plaque. You would all sit under the shade of the trees, listen to the burble of the fountain and the happy voices of civilian life, and think back on what you’d done.

Think back on the last time you’d felt whole and alive and real, and wonder, with no small amount of despair, why you couldn’t move on from what you’d seen that day.

But even that assumed you were dealing with something other than a genocide.

When you were dealing with a genocide, all the rules went out the window. Those terrible days, all you could feel was your soul slowly being crushed by what you found and who you failed to save. Your mind was slowly consumed by the lights that died in your arms, and the pieces of people’s stories that could never be reunited with their homes.

To put it simply, it was haunting. A creeping, dark spirit of tragedy and horror, that shook your belief in innate human goodness.

The tenacious few could make it through that, but never in the same shape, and never as long as if they’d never seen the Devil.

As Galo stood on the floor of the engine room, looking at the backlit forms strung up before those glowing pink lights, he felt something in him cleave and tumble away. Something very important, that he tried to ignore as he worked with his rescue team to get the trapped Burnish civilians out of their predicament.

But in time, that crack, like all breaks left unaddressed, destabilized and shifted. More parts wore down and flaked, sheered off. The ones that healed did so badly, grinding together where once there had been a smooth whole.

In the days and weeks that followed the fall of the ship, of the government, it became apparent that there was no end to this particular disaster. Not for the people living here, not for the people working the rescue, and certainly not for the people who had been “rescued.”

And rescue was an optimistic word. They were _freed_ , physically, from their torture chambers. The were not _saved_ , not by any measure of the term.

And for the service workers who were trapped between an evil government and the reasons they’d chosen that profession…

There was no happy park of peace waiting at the end of this tunnel. There was no debris field to clear because it was the whole damn city. With each person he dug out of rubble, there were ten disembodies _parts._ For every five he let down from the engine, one had turned to ash. For every comrade he cheered up, there were two that he found weeping in quiet corners. For every grim, determined command given, there was a minute of complete loss flickering across the planning table.

As the days, the hours, the _minutes_ passed by, and the things he saw were carved into his soul like acid rain, Galo came to realize ever more vividly that this wasn’t rescuing people from something unfortunate but natural, something sad but _inevitable_ , and painting himself a hero for the trouble.

No, this was horror, plain and simple, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have been able to prevent it all if he’d stopped idolizing Kray Foresight sooner.

This wasn’t a legend that deserved to be remembered, and he didn’t want to be part of it. At the end of every shift, he just wanted to curl up and cry and pretend it wasn’t happening; to find shelter in the arms of a mother and father whose faces he couldn’t even remember.

It brings him a moment of respite, to know they hadn’t died in a disaster like this, where they might have not even made it to a missing list. There was little left of Galo’s home after the fire, but at least people knew who had died there. There were thousands of people that were going to have died here whose entire existence could be assumed only from missing lists, and several hundred at least who would never even get that far, unknown to all those left alive.

It’s that kind of thought that makes the tears come. It’s because they make him want to reach out to Kray. To cling to him for comfort, as the only person left to him who would know to look for him, and mourn him, should he join his parents one day, too.

He can remember the man’s face so vividly. Both the austere one and the rarer happy one from when he was a boy.

And the fiery one—

That is where he hides his face in his ash-covered gloves and his lips pull back from his teeth and he cries, always.

He couldn’t talk about it with anyone. They had their own troubles to deal with, and didn’t need his added on. There wasn’t a lot of physical ability to talk anyway, since recovery was loud work with people spread thin. It was dangerous at the best of times, too, requiring constant focus, attention, and teamwork. The first thing you got taught in school about it was that “the disaster can still claim more lives—yours.”

And sometimes, as Galo gazed up at yet another skyscraper to run through and clear of bodies, warm or cold, ash or pieces (because they were all pieces, anymore, never whole), he couldn’t help but wish that it might.

It was a thought that would show up sometimes, just bursting into the back of his brain like someone had slingshotted it in there. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want it. It was so odd at first, though, that it didn’t hurt.

At first, he could dismiss it and focus on the task at hand, but as time went on, it started to sound more appealing. There started to be an insecure cold creeping over his body when he was alone, and in those quiet moments in the dark, when that thought arrived not long after, it started to scare him, just a little, because the thought felt _good_ against all the pain.

But even in the daytime, in the break areas and command tents, he couldn’t talk about it. This was team-oriented, task-focused time. Whining and worrying wouldn’t help the mission, especially not about vague feelings so deep not even Galo Thymos, Emotional Support Hero, could find the words to articulate them.

 _Besides._ He had to keep up the façade of wellness: No one wanted to lose both the city’s heroes in one day. Even if Galo knew his own heroic achievements had been a lie, the rest of the city didn’t have to. As the whispers began of what Kray had done and his government had _allowed_ , that became only more apparent.

People would _look_ at him. Not suspiciously, exactly. But _dangerously_. Like they were about to rip him to shreds just for existing in their space. The question was on their lips: _Did he know? Was he part of it? They had some kind of close relationship, right? Was it illicit? Was it sordid? Was he one of the chosen few…? I bet he was…_

And then, not too long after this began, there came another whisper, one none of them should have even known: _Wasn’t he arrested for helping the terrorists and attacking Foresight like two weeks ago?_

He supposes he has Captain Ignis to thank for that, or the others in his squad, either defending him or just mentioning it off-hand.

He’s not sure if he’s thankful for it or not. After all, the things people are saying behind his back are incorrect, but the place they’re coming from isn’t. In this world where ash keeps falling from the sky and the sun never rises and the search dogs keep finding twisted, melted, ashen pieces until even they are despairing and sad, that much he knows for sure: Their venom and suspicion upon him is not wrong.

After all, there’s a disaster zone in downtown, a volcano erupting nearby, mild earthquakes going off all the time, and their shining leader of the past fifteen years has been arrested for a genocide.

One Galo could have perhaps prevented, if he had been willing to push the man, and himself, just a little harder.

It’s as the days of recovery work drag on that he wonders why his burning soul feels extinguished. Where once there was a bright and airy love of life to propel him forward to each new challenge, now there is only a hateful and heavy cold, that makes him want to curl and never move.

Maybe the Promare had taken his fire with them, too?

The first responders and city personnel are working around the clock in shifts to deal with things. With injuries and lists. With rubble and ash. With bodies and families. With the Parnassus’s damn _engine_ , to see if there’s some backup nuclear reactor that can lift the thing so it can lower its walls and get back into its canyon properly. If they can’t, all the skyscrapers within its boundaries are going to collapse sooner or later. They’d still probably need to be condemned eventually for having been tilted so long. But there is a small semblance of comfort knowing the thing wasn’t using the Burnish to run the lights and doors.

It makes him upset to think about, though. It makes him so _confused_ , and then that makes him feel ashamed. And then he feels nothing at all, flickering only between exhaustion and distress in a haze.

It does not help matters that the leadership of the city seems to be changing by the hour and Galo is not sure who among them will order him disappeared and who will not.

He knows the government will come for him sooner or later, be it to testify or to be arrested or to be shot. He has no idea which it will be in the end though, or when, but he is nothing If not loyal to the people he serves. So he simply works as many hours as he physically can, doesn’t let anyone he doesn’t know get too physically close to him, looks over his shoulder when he walks alone, changes which coffee pot he drinks out of every day, and…tries to pick up the pieces of his life in the meantime.

And there are several major pieces it has broken into: his respect for the governor and their relationship. His respect for the _government_ , and his relationship to it, too. The death of his family, which is suddenly a raw and weeping wound once more, more bitterly painful than it had ever been before. The fact that he’d become a pseudo-burnish for a few minutes, and what it meant about him that it still bothered him to accept the fact that he could control flame.

Not to mention the fact that his life in Promepolis might finally be well and truly fucked if Kray’s escaped network of close supporters decide they want to emigrate to another planet with whatever non-Promare power source they can engineer twenty years from now and so put him back in charge and cover everything up to do it, including Galo and the Burnish and anyone who sides with them. Kray is, after all, still the richest and most charismatic man in the city, and one of the smartest. They might _need_ him, to keep a civil war from breaking out, and Galo _knows_ the man wouldn’t mind pulling those strings. History tells that for a man like that, influence won’t go down that easily, locked up or not. All he had to do was bide his time.

And what did that mean for…himself?

That was what scared him the most, when it came to the governor: That so long as Kray was alive, it would never be over. He would never get away from these horrific memories. They would infest him, and eat at him, until there was nothing left but someone who wanted to forgive Kray Foresight, and be forgiven by him. Someone who would forget everything he had seen in this disaster, just so he could feel warm and safe and loved in that man’s welcoming arms again.

Galo hated that person. He wanted to run away screaming from that person.

But he also wondered, deep down, if maybe that was the only person he had ever been. How was he supposed to ask his coworkers for help if _that_ was who was asking? He would quite honestly rather die than show that face to anyone.

After all, every memory that meant anything to him had Kray Foresight in it. Trust in the city’s shining star was the foundation of every piece of who he was; living under his dazzling rays, however far beneath the canopy, was the nourishment through which he’d grown into himself.

And now…who even was he?

When he looked inside himself to get an answer, all he found was a pile of Lego blocks falling and scattering out of his heart like blood gushing from a wound.

It made him reel. It made him unbalanced, and scared, and desperate for something familiar and steady to hold onto. Like he was drowning under the waves, and he couldn’t tell which way was up. Like, no matter how hard he clawed at the death around him, there was no purchase, no way to _breathe_.

That thought was why, after a while, he had to give the Captain his gun and told the man to lock it up somewhere in the station that Galo didn’t have the key to.

The man hadn’t asked him a single question about it, and Galo hadn’t been able to look him in the eye about it, either. He’d simply waited for the hangman’s noose of paid leave to tighten around his neck, but when it didn’t, he turned on his heel and swept back out to the proving grounds, his shoulders held a little broader.

And then there was Lio.

Lio Fotia had swept into his life like a wildfire. A violent, raging inferno that affected everything equally and left both destruction and new opportunities in his wake. A terrorist—an actual, honest-to-god _terrorist_ —who is at once the most beautiful and powerful and controversial thing he has ever seen.

He is the light that Galo’s aching heart wants to follow, and in the darkness of these never-ending days, he can’t find him at all.

Galo might have only met him a week or two ago, but he can’t get the man off his mind. His power, his intensity, his dedication, his rage and his suffering—it’s like a disease, or a drug. It’s gotten into him and he can’t get it out no matter how hard he tries, but it feels like it’s heating and soldiering that crack inside him into something resembling a whole. Lio is righteous and generous. He is dignified and honest and clear-headed. He is beautiful, too, like some ethereal god striding around the earth in both grief and rage that his beautiful sandbox has been tampered with.

Galo needs all those things right now and more, and he knows how pathetic it is. 

He wants to believe his obsession is just concern for a comrade, a fellow human being that he has a stack of reason to worry about, but he has a sinking suspicion it’s not that.

Or should he say, a smoldering one.

After all, his thoughts will wander, sometimes, as he’s picking up rubble or tending to someone’s wounds, what touching Lio is like. Through all those tailored clothes or under them. Does he smile quietly and maybe gasp a little when he’s touched in a way that pleases him, or does he giggle? Does he groan, or plead, or melt when wrapped in big strong loving arms, or does he prefer to hold people down and whisper terrible things into their ear to unwind them? Does he prefer to be big spoon or little spoon? Is it possible to make him laugh, and what might that situation be? What does that sound like, and what euphoria would Galo feel for having caused it?

Would that sound be the flint-spark he needs to restart his guttering fire? Or maybe the fond look in Lio’s sparkling fire-opal eyes that comes after?

Galo takes a deep breath and shakes his head out. There’s no point in thinking about it; erotic daydreams are nice and all as a way to escape his problems that are so very many suddenly—especially when one is concerned about being targeted by a corrupt government sooner rather than later; the desire to reproduce under stress and all that. But this borders on vivid hallucinations and this person isn’t his to imagine in that way. This person isn’t even _around_.

It does make him stop and think, though, about his parents. About what it means to have survived this long, if he’s just going to die because the man he trusted to love him in their place manages to finish the job.

Tears come to his eyes those times, and he can’t stop them. He feels like he’s falling apart, crumbling to nothing, and there’s nobody there to catch him.

Nobody but graves he desperately wants to go visit, but can’t, because there’s too many dead people around him right now to excavate back to _their_ loved ones.

And anyway. _Anyway_ , he thinks as he sucks a hot breath into his chest and forces the feelings down. No matter how warm and gentle the fire had been in his chest…

It’s not like Lio Fotia has a reason to ever see him again.

Lio is a revolutionary. An anti-government rebel who had been living in the wastes surrounded by his closest confidants and followers, all of whom he’d assembled around him through deed and personality alone. Lio is an ethereal, heroic leader of a man, the kind that legends love.

Galo, in contrast, is but a paper thin-copy. He is a rookie firefighter and emergency responder. He is the personification of law and order, just another body in a widely-held bottom-tier job, easily replaced. He has lived in the city all his life, surrounded by people who supposedly cared about him but who never really saw him or had time for him.

They kept him alive for a paycheck or their own conscience or the fear of the grinding gears of the law that were bigger than both of their little lives, but anything particular to himself or his experience of existence was unnecessary in the equation. His life had been a transaction, and despite how he’d tried to shine, it was all just artificial illumination, hoping for some praise.

The constellation that is Lio, by contrast, can’t help but command the attention of people. He does it for no reason other than what is good and right. He is a natural star, blazing in the void for no other reason than it must, for that is its nature.

And Galo… He’d thought he was that, but he isn’t. He’d thought he was a special case, saved by serendipity and fate to become a legend, but he isn’t. He’s a tool, like he’s always been. If Lio is the burning air of the desert wind itself, Galo is a simple lightning bug, living on a blade of grass in the night, hoping for a mate to find him.

Furthermore, lately he is a shooting star, falling ever faster toward its inexorable demise against the cold, hard Earth.

He’d had the most powerful man in the city on speed dial and supported him through his meteoric rise. He had never tried to abuse that connection, but in retrospect, Kray certainly had. But even if he’d known that a little bit at the time, Galo had overlooked it. It was worth it, to have an older man in his periphery that he could believe genuinely cared about him, saw him, made time for him. Someone who had been there to witness his life change irreparably and who had been a steady institution to him ever since. Someone with power and purpose and poise, a heroic monolith of a man he could look up to who wasn’t going to die on him. He’d thought Kray was genuinely interested in guiding him—he’d paid attention on the times he did show up—but…apparently it’d been a lie? He’d been doing it because…why? Guilt? Or because he didn’t want to risk the bad press from being perceived as cold? Because he was waiting for the right moment to get rid of him?

 _I don’t want to be someone else’s baggage_ , a little voice in his mind said, that was far more hurt than it had a right to be. A voice that sounded terribly close to his voice as a child, laced with anxiety and desperate not to be abandoned again.

Galo wished he could ask him. He also wanted to be nowhere near him. It was a strange push and pull in his gut, that made him feel like he was losing his mind.

And Lio...

If Galo had thought he was compatible with Kray and had been that wrong, how could he ever hope to be something Lio would want, let alone prize or cherish? He was just Galo Thymos, optimistic idiot and orphan and he wasn’t even optimistic anymore. It was not a combination anyone wanted to buy.

 _I was the hero of the city, all on my own, and it_ still _wasn’t enough for Him…_

Galo was a simple person, he knew that. But it didn’t make him unlovable, did it? He tried to be a good man, a supportive and cheerful and manly one, who lived up to a high moral code of his own making and strove to better himself and learn things. He worked out, ate well, held a job and had goals. He paid his own bills and had a few hobbies, dabbled in cooking and loving and engineering and history, tried to treat people well and behave ethically and be a steady tree for his friends to lean on. He even had a bit of savings and a tie he knew how to knot. Maybe his problem was just that he liked smart, complicated men and wanted them to like him back.

_Maybe I should just give Aina that kiss she’s been hoping for and call it good…_

He didn’t really like Aina that way—she was sweet when she wasn’t bossy—but she cared about him, so maybe he could get some kind of fire to light there if he tried hard enough. It worked for arranged marriages for most of human history, right…?

Galo sighed as he moved more rubble with his mech for the umpteenth time, careful not to land any on anybody nearby.

It wouldn’t really be fair to her, but it wasn’t like she had other offers or her eyes on other targets. People would be happy for them. Their children would be strong and vibrant. It was a story, a myth, that people around the city would like. One, if he was honest with the little voice inside himself, that he wanted to be worthy of.

With a sigh, Galo put his mech in park. He placed his face in his hands and rubbed briskly.

He wasn’t sure why he was thinking about this. Why he was even entertaining it—it went against his code to give people less than what they were worth. But still, when faced with the idea of being alone at night…he couldn’t understand why it felt so intolerably, terrifyingly cold, suddenly.

_Are you proud of me, Mom and Dad?_

For a long time after The Fire, he’d been afraid to fall asleep. But what had been even worse was every morning when he woke _up_ alone, and knew his parents were never going to be the ones to open the door and greet him ever again. When he didn’t sleep, he could at least pretend that if he just stayed up long enough, he’d hear their voices, the shuffle of their shoes. He’d be at home, chasing the sound of the key in the lock, or they’d come here, picking him up after a long, bad joke.

The memory had been coming back to him with a vengeance since the disaster started, as he slept on cots in the first responder tents. He didn’t know why; he’d thought he’d long gotten past it. Sleeping in the group rooms at the station felt like having a family again; felt like being in the orphanage with giggling sleepovers and adults that watched over you, however rigidly. Maybe it was the open-air factor of it—the sounds, smells, and temperatures that filtered in while he slept. Maybe all that was why he kept dreaming about the graves.

The first night of recovery efforts, he’d dreamed about all the Burnish. The people in the pods:

It started with a pile of ash. A far too big pile of ash in the center of the engine, spilling out of the broken core like a waterfall. It glittered though, like diamonds or maybe stars lived in it, and while he ran toward it to the sound of discordant moans rumbling through the cavernous room like a hive of bees, as he dug through it up to his knees, _the_ _other_ _voices_ tinkled through his senses like wind chimes:

A hum, at first, like a chorus of churchly voices. Singing, ringing, it was kind of a combination of both.

And then whispers, as he tried to focus on it: _Fire. Burn. Release me. Listen to me. Know me. Want me. **Galo.**  
_

He could feel it reaching out to him, whatever it was. Touching at him curiously, with rainbow tendrils just out of sight feathering over the cracks in his soul.

And his body was cracked too, laced like half-cooled lava beds. But the rainbow light was coming from the diamonds in the ash, and slowly, they turned liquid. Sitting on top of the charcoal dust of human bodies, the flowing, singing diamonds coalesced together and disappeared beneath the surface.

Galo dug through it like he’d dug through the ice at the lake what felt like so long ago now. Faster, harsher, dust from destroyed lives covering him until he didn’t recognize his own color.

He told them he was coming. That he would help them. That he could put them back together. Hitched and cracking, his voice screamed out to them.

But the tortured pleas for help around him in the room died out one by one, bodies in pods collapsing in puffs of smoke and trails of ash.

When he couldn’t stand the sound anymore, he dove into the mountain of ash, and began to swim through it.

He couldn’t breathe. He knew that, and his lungs slowly came to burn. But there was a voice drawing him in, an otherworldly harmony. It clarified in the sparkling darkness as a light, a little pink and teal flame far away.

Galo swam toward it, bubbles of rainbow following his strokes.

He didn’t have long. He knew he didn’t. He had to get there before he died.

The light clarified into a human shape. A boy, curled in a fetal position, shining that metallic, flickering rainbow. There was a darkness in his chest where he held his hands, the color inverted from what it should be. It crawled through his veins like tinted blood, and soon he started to struggle to get away from it, like it hurt him, like it was leeching what little life he had left out of him.

Galo promised he was coming, promised he wouldn’t let him go too, wouldn’t let any of them go. But just as he reached the last stroke out for him—just as the boy lifted his head and turned to him—Galo was yanked backward.

The boy reached out to him, his name silently on his lips, but their hands failed to connect in the thick darkness, missing by millimeters.

Hands, innumerable and black as soot, closed around Galo's flesh. His arms, his legs, his throat—all were clamped around his skin until he could no longer see the one he was looking for.

They burned. They froze. They screamed, and their nails dug in until he was ripped apart at the fire-colored seams to banshee wails of _You promised, **Where,** Why didn’t you save me, **Are you,** Where were you!, **Galo?**_

He woke from that dream shouting, the feeling of their fingertips still in his calves and forearms and the real-life moan of all the people from the engine room filling his ears. It lasted long after people—real people, living people—had grabbed him and tried to shake him out of it. It’d worked only after a few times, and he’d nearly broken someone’s nose for it.

He could still feel the burning fingers digging into his eyes, and cold ones sliding down his nose and throat, and for a long time, he just huddled to himself, breathing hard, shivering, wondering why the feeling wouldn't _stop_. 

It hadn’t made him any more popular among the ranks, but it wasn’t like he was the only one it’d happened to. He may have been among the first, but in the days to come, it was quite normal to wake up in the middle of the night in the tents because of someone making panicked noises and thrashing in their sleep.

The second night, he dreamed of ash falling in the streets. That somehow, the ash coming from the nearby volcano had fallen so deep he was drowning. He called for help, cycled through everyone he trusted, everyone he _knew_ , but no one came, and eventually, he suffocated, the ash clogging his mouth and nose and insides, until he, too, was nothing but tightly-packed ash, a statue left for a barren earth to claim. The feeling lingered in his lungs throughout most of the next day, constricted and anxious. The grief of witnessing humanity's extinction, too, clung to him like a chill he couldn't quite shake.

The third night, he was small and standing by his parents’ graves, holding a much younger Kray Foresight’s hand.

It had been calm at first, that dream, and Galo had relished it. There’d been an overwhelming since of sheer _comfort_ , welling up from the view of his mother and father’s shared headstone, that wrapped him in its warmth, like they were just under the covers, sleeping with smiles on their faces. Like they were still watching him somehow, and wishing him well.

Kray had said something, then, that Galo couldn't quite catch. The man squeezed his hand to get his attention, and a tense and dark emotion whipped through the dream as if in warning. The sunlight disappeared into sudden night, and with it came bone-chilling cold.

When Galo looked up, the man had red eyes, and flaming hair, and sharp teeth. He bit into Galo and shredded him; piece by jagged piece he pulled him apart, as Galo shrieked and cried and pleaded for him to stop and _please just love me,_ in his pitiful, high-pitched child’s voice.

And in the pain and heat of the suffocating flame, a hungry voice commanded:

**_Come back to me_.  
**

After that, Galo tried to find ways not to sleep at all.

But even that would prove to be only just the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A playlist of Michelle Branch's songs from the '90s on youtube helped me finish this. A bunch of the songs fit the tone and intensity of this really well, but the one I jammed to most is "I'd Rather Be in Love."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NGL, I wrote a whole bunch of this over the last week or so, and I cried writing every major scene. This is gonna be one heck of a ride, you guys.
> 
> I hope this can be as cathartic for you as it is for me. Definitely let me know what you think, and thanks so much for reading! :)

Kray had been at his parents’ funeral. He’d visited the orphanage in the early days and the press loved that once they figured it out. They’d been close, for being strangers. Kray was instantly like a new dad, or maybe the step brother he’d never had.

And it had been good, at least for Galo, his hero often visiting him. He shined as Kray shined. But in the last few years, something had changed, cooling off between them. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a cute kid anymore. Maybe it was because the world was ending and Kray was building his ark. Maybe it was because Kray wanted him _dead_. But whatever the case, it had forced Galo to stand on his own two feet more and it had done good things for him.

He’d gone to paramedic school and graduated. He’d gotten into a prestigious firefighter academy on his own merits. He hadn’t told Kray until he’d gotten accepted, and it was still one of his proudest achievements. Kray had offered to help him get a job, provided his performance in school was good, so Galo had worked to graduate with top honors. Kray had shown up for the ceremony.

The picture of him holding his degree was with Kray. It’d ended up in the paper on the front page. The press had loved it, and done an entire retrospective on them. He had all the clippings from it in a special binder.

He’d gotten a job as promised, with people who promised not to go easy on him, just as he’d wanted. Ignis still intimidated him but he and Varys worked out together. He didn’t have much to offer Remi and vice versa but the man liked his cooking and had his back on calls and Galo made sure to thank him in a way he’d actually accept. The mad scientist gremlin made him toys and troubleshooted his own engineering ideas and Aina had a crush on him. He moved into his own apartment from the halfway home to make space for the next kid and to this day thanks the nuns with holiday treats and donations.

It was a life. It was the start of a _very good_ life. And while Kray hadn’t been there for much of it, it _felt_ like he’d been there for all of it, watching, approving, _caring_.

And yet…he’d actually been the one who’d orphaned him in the first place.

Galo was willing to forgive him for that. It was a long time ago; you’d never forget family but he was a different person now. And anyway, Burnish couldn’t control their powers, most of them. It’d been an accident. He could forgive that.

But Kray, it seemed, didn’t want to be forgiven.

And that, most of all, was what hurt him. That, most of all, was what he couldn’t understand.

Galo wouldn’t be so dramatic as to say he was nothing without Kray Foresight. But he also couldn’t be sure what was _left_ , either.

After nearly dropping a load of concrete blocks on a guy and rotating into another, he decides it’s time to quit for the day. He tells Ignis as much, and his captain sends him to the makeshift bunkhouse to rest.

He tries to sleep, but it only lasts a few hours and it ends in a nightmare of living fire. Of tiny ethereal giggles and smoke and kissing Lio under a sky of rainbow stars singing happily—and of Lio dying in the destroyed engine bloc, bleeding out as he twists and squirms in Kray’s arms, Kray’s flaming teeth deep in his neck.

Of Lio calling for him, desperately, in pain, afraid, and Galo being unable to help him as he breaks apart and is taken away into the Promare homeland.

In the end, Galo is beset upon by Kray’s flames, and he too burns away in a swirl of poisonous flame. But his ash is left on the earth, forever parted from the one he wants to touch.

Galo knows he won’t get to sleep after that—doesn’t even want to try—and so, with tired limbs, he brushes the tears out of his eyes, grabs some coffee and stale donuts, and heads to the accursed ship from his dreams.

The thing is huge, like utterly ridiculously huge. Walls encase twenty-story skyscrapers, and it’s at least a mile long, like an aircraft carrier. The tallest building in the city is its bridge. Kray said it could hold ten thousand people but he thinks maybe he misspoke because on a good day 100,000 people live and work in this section of town. Hell, he’d put upwards of 15,000 people in the hell-engine alone.

…And the injured are all still within its walls.

It makes sense: Disaster response involves triaging people as close as is safe, to minimize resource usage. The main promenade through the ship—Court Avenue—is a perfect chunk of the city to triage people in, at least the parts where buildings aren’t falling down and turned to dirt mountains. It’s certainly in better shape than the part of town Lio torched, ironically. Still, he thinks it can’t be helping people’s stress levels to still be on the goddamned _ship_.

Galo’s skills in the mech made him more valuable there overall, as they’re new things in short supply, but the other Burning Rescue and Freeze Force people can pilot them too. Galo’s other use is as a medic, and that’s what he does now, on three hours of sleep and as many coffees.

He’s best at light triage—sprains, bruises, cuts, stiches, diagnosing breaks, CPR, check-overs—and that’s actually great because even though it’s several _days_ after the fall of this place, the backlog of injured is so huge that people are still waiting to be treated. The thousands that are mild to moderately injured—and getting that way while doing recovery work—are still here waiting to be seen, or cycling around again. It seemed odd, but if the infrastructure was destroyed, you had no where to go, and you were hurt, it only made sense to stay where the authorities, food, water, and medical care were, even if it took all day to get.

Not all of the people are Burnish—only the ones with cauterized missing limbs and hollow faces. Everyone on the ship was hurt when it dropped out of the sky—some severely. It’d take weeks just to get to all the concussions and broken bones and sprains. Obviously, that wasn’t quickly enough, so every medic that could circulate needed to.

The first person he’s sent to in the night is a child. A little girl with a towel wrapped around one eye and her head, and a twenty-something woman who could be either her mother or sister is with her. He talks to the little girl in a friendly tone about her favorite toys to keep her calm in the floodlights of this particular trauma tent, and slowly diagnoses over a seeping wound over her eyebrow that’s a mix of gash and bruising and is getting infected. He tells the older girl as much, and she apologizes for the lack of resources to fix it, she tried her best to find them. He tells her not to worry, for he, and medical care, are here now.

Galo cleans the wound out as the little girl cries and squirms in the arms of her caregiver, gives her stitches once she calms, and talks her through it with tired, even tones. He thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he feels more tired than her caregiver looks. Then he wonders why that matters, and why, for just a moment, he desperately wanted to blurt it out to them.

He controls himself, however, and the little girl smiles at him when he’s done, the first time in their whole conversation. She’s missing teeth like a normal kid. It brightens him up a little, and he sets a really good dressing when he’s finished cleaning out her wound. In the space for small talk that ensues, he learns that the woman with her isn’t her mother or sister or aunt or cousin. They’re total strangers, and she just felt responsible and wanted to keep the little girl safe and comforted.

Galo stops and stares at her then, and the little girl too—remembering him and Kray. Was this what it had looked like, the two of them, to the paramedics? Was this little tug in his chest what the reporters felt, that made them decide the two of them were a worthy story?

But this young woman would get no praise; this child would get no press. They’d probably go their separate ways soon, and never even know each other’s names. They would live their entire lives without knowing who the other was or what happened to them; just one pair among the thousands to do the same this day.

Was time and place and the leisure of the populace to read the news really so important to creating a hero?

The woman says his name a few times, and Galo shakes it off. He directs them both to the lost child tent (they call it the lost parent tent, though) and hopes both have the luck and the foresight not to identify as Burnish on the forms if they are one.

As he sees their backs disappear into the crowd, his mind wanders to Kray and his motivations. It also makes him think of Ignis though, as he gets to his feet and reties his floppy hair into a slightly more sophisticated ponytail.

On the surface, his captain was harder to connect to than Kray, and for a long time the professionalism had been a tidy and respectful gulf between them. But over time, Galo saw things about him that he was forced to admit he respected: his administrative quality. His leadership under pressure. His care of his team’s personal and work needs. His willingness to get his hands dirty to fix something broken, or order new parts, or how he went to bat for people. His unerring steadiness, physically and emotionally.

It wasn’t exactly like he had a lot of free time, but Captain Ignis laughed more freely than Kray did, and when they did connect, it felt more…real? somehow. Different, but stronger. Less brittle.

Galo had only been there for about a year, but it had been a formative year in which he’d blossomed in so many ways. But the things he’d seen about Ignis, and the way everyone interacted, had made whispers appear in the back of his mind about himself and Kray. The doubts seemed so obviously founded now, but at the time, he’d pushed them all aside. Maybe because he didn’t want to see them. Maybe because he couldn’t.

But now…

As Galo looks around himself, he sees dozens of exhausted people caring for one another: an elderly couple leaning on each other. Women with children. Men with wives and girlfriends. Young people huddling together and consoling each other in groups. Even in the fear, in the panic, there are smiles here and there.

There are bright spots of humanity showing through.

Had he and Kray…ever had that?

He remembers so many years— _years_ —of standing in the man’s shadow, talking _at_ him. Hoping to tickle open the lock of attention, to find a way to train the rusty neck of the lamp on his work without burning his hand.

What he had thought was love and kindness was nothing but…tolerance. And barely, apparently.

The thought hits his heart like an arrow, lurching him off balance yet again.

He really has to stop thinking about Kray. Every time he does, his footing shifts like the desert sands, and he gets further and further away from any sense of stability.

So as Galo gets to the next patient in the queue, he focuses on Ignis, another steady boulder of a man. Galo had never been one to back down from a challenge, so after he’d gotten his professional position, he had quickly set to work trying to impress his new boss. The thing was, though…Ignis didn’t _want_ that. It had confused Galo at first; the man wanted him to stay alive and safe, to fight another day. He wanted him to learn and grow and bond with his team.

Kray never cared about any of that. He only ever cared that Galo didn’t disappoint him or make him look bad.

It wasn’t that he came out and said it, really. It was more about what he _didn’t_ say.

But Galo, at the time, had written that off, too: Kray was holding him at arm’s length for appearance’s sake, not wanting to be seen granting favors. He had other priorities and duties. He had a life that didn’t involve Galo and he should be allowed to live it. The man was just pushing Galo to be independent and better. It was a totally normal thing to expect from an adult. In fact, he was stern but endlessly patient explaining things, which of course Galo needed, because who could be as smart as Kray Foresight?

But Ignis never made him feel that way. Lucia did, but then again, Lucia admitted it and always let him in on her projects before everyone else—and she let him razz her back. In turn, he sent her all the news he’d get about new tech. They were a good, conspiratory little team.

And that was it, wasn’t it? They were a good team. Because there was _room_ for him there.

Which there had never been, with Kray.

The realization hits Galo hard enough to make him stop in his tracks and sigh, even surrounded by broken people on blankets looking up at him for help.

_But maybe If he’d let me in…he wouldn’t have felt he had to do all this…_

By the 25th person, Galo can’t remember the names of anything in his kit, let alone his patients, and thinks he’s hallucinating. He ends up in a corner, tucked around a building, heavy eyelids closing over teary blue eyes.

_In the darkness, the strike of a lighting match. The dray crackle of burning._

_A rainbow volley of sparks coming from a tiny, tear-drop-shaped flame, each color tuned to a different pitch as it flew away or toward him._

_Following one of those floating lights, igniting in front of his eyes and dancing through the air as the only thing in the black void, inside the flame there grows visible a triangle of all sorts of psychedelic colors, like watercolor ink bleeding and pulsing and mutating._

_He reaches for it, aching for its warmth._

_He realizes, with some confusion, that it’s not his arm he sees reaching upward. It’s a thin arm, hand smaller than his, with fingers that bend more than he’s used to, all encased in a shiny-black leather half-glove._

_Still, he reaches for the flames with an awareness that it is his life slipping away. He must reach it, or he’s going to die. The cold spreading up his legs will consume him, will turn him to particulate._

_The cold, like he’s dunked his hand in a bucket of ice water, takes over his fingers. He’s got to reach that little light, before he’s got nothing left to hold it with._

_But just as he closes his fist around the singing triangle, his entire arm shifts to so much black sand, and falls away in a cascade._

_The ash is pulled into the technicolor light like an accretion disk around a star, choking it. The flames gutter out, and it turns purple and immobile. The pretty, perky, triangular swirl of color inside of it turns sluggish and solid. It sings a sad note, a pained note, and he knows, as the triangle falls and the darkness claws over him, that this is it—he’s flickering away. There’s not enough left of him to move._

_He’ll never be able to tell his friends goodbye._

_He’ll never be able to save his people._

_He’ll never be able to tell that firefighter thank you._

_A breath shudders out of his lungs and he knows, somehow, it is the last one he will ever get._

_His rasping chest falls silent, and darkness and cold seep into him in its place. Not even the sound of his heartbeat comes to him any longer. The knowledge of failure becomes all that’s left of him. Waiting for the last of his body to disappear into dust—for the last of his spark of existence to gutter out, like so many others—he listens to the darkness._

_He closes his eyes and with no small sense of relief accepts that his fight is over now._

_Numbness spreads through what’s left of his limbs, crawling up from the tips of his extremities. He closes off his consciousness from his body and waits for that last flicker of his existence to fail completely. He’s already dead, he knows, so he waits. While trying not to sob from the disappointment and the frustration and, if he’s honest with himself, the utter fear, he waits for Nothing to come and claim him._

_But what greets him isn’t Nothing. It’s the light of a little flickering flame, an earthly flame, and the sound of a large breath pulling into deep lungs._

**_Stay with me—_ **

* * *

He goes to his next shift thinking of Lio. He hasn’t seen him since this whole disaster started. Bone weary, he takes the long way to his post, wandering through the Burnish territory, for those that were willing to identify so or forced to, but he sees no familiar shock of iridescent blond on the other side of the wall of armed soldiers, no familiar faces of any kind. He asks around, to the gaunt faces looking out from under dirty hair with suspicion and fear. But those that are willing to speak to an outsider explain that they haven’t seen him since the settlement attack. Has he abandoned them? Has he died? Is he still captured? It scares them, the realization of his absence, and Galo comes to understand that he’s doing more harm than good by asking.

Eventually, he stands in the middle of their plaza for too long, staring at the cracks in the pavement.

There has to be a way to find him, but he has no idea what it is.

“If you see him, tell him Galo is looking for him, okay? Burning Rescue Three. Station Three. That’s where he can find me.”

He has no idea if the people he tells—about five in all—have any contact with Lio, or even know what he looks like. But it’s better than nothing, to keep his feet moving on the way back to the debris removal teams.

He makes it to his post and immediately slices his hand open on a jagged piece of metal after tripping on his own two feet. It’s a spectacular moment and while he’s wrapping up his hand, telling everyone he’s fine, apparently he _not fine enough_ because the guy who saw the whole thing happen found Remi, who found the site foreman on duty when Ignis isn’t, and together they look over his shift records with troubled faces and hushed whispers.

“You still got a home, son?” the guy finally asks.

Galo frowns, thinking this is some sort of special dig about his childhood, or Kray. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snaps back over the bandages.

The pair exchange a glance. Remi answers for him that he does.

“Go home,” the Foreman states. “Twenty-four hour rest. You’re exhausted and no help to anyone that way. I’ll relay it to your Captain. Come back here tomorrow around this time and check back in.”

“But…what am I supposed to do for twenty-four entire goddamned hours?” Galo balks, brain not doing the math well. It felt like an eternity as a time-out for a cut that didn’t even need stitches.

“Eat a good meal, fuck a nice girl, and sleep. Take a shower and remember what you’re fighting for out here.” He narrows his eyes. “You safe to drive?”

At least he wasn’t asking if Galo had a real woman available, rather than a plastic one. Galo probably isn’t safe to drive, but after a strong grumble, he goes anyway. Even though he’s been called to more of those types of crashes than he can remember, even though he just saved a city and a planet and helped countless people, he goes without a care for himself and his new wound.

As the pavement zips by—as the trees, the birds, the reflections in glass windows catch the blue and white of Earth’s singular sky—he can’t seem to shake the idea he’s being packed away. He’s sure he’ll get over it when he’s had a good sleep, but he doesn’t much feel like inhabiting his old life and its lies right now, either.

He doesn’t really want to be at home, because he’s not sure what home even means, anymore.

The key sliding into the lock is the first familiar thing he’s felt in near-on two weeks. It sparks something in him, and he almost thinks everything’s going to be fine when he opens the door.

It’s not.

It’s not that his place is ransacked, which the government spooks could have done with all this time that’s elapsed, or is looted (not that he has anything of value here—all his engineering tools are at the station), or that it’s been destroyed by earthquakes or flames or mechs.

No, his building is mercifully in-tact. What’s wrong is that everything is _exactly_ as he left it.

His apartment is as he left it the day he went to see Kray at City Hall, and the man decided to kill him.

In the blue twilight slipping through the miniblinds and the soft shadows, Galo’s head turns on his thick neck, while his feet stay rooted to the spot.

Living room, with a fuzzy dalmatian-pattern blanket on the back of the couch, and a video game console under the small TV, a few select games in the stand next to it. A narrow table along the wall immediately to his side, full of mail half-dealt with. Shoes by the door. A cereal bowl on the kitchen counter that he hadn’t had time to clean that morning, as distracted as he’d been. A book on an end table, with a _matoi_ -themed bookmark in it. And on the walls…

On the walls…

Galo stares at it for a long time, and then walks into the room with his ash covered boots, as if moved by an unseen force.

He stands in front of the wall of pictures, while he himself is covered in the carcinogenic ash of human bodies, brought about by the fear and hatred of one powerful man.

The frames and prints are simple, hung artistically, albeit only by sight. He remembers each hook, each hammer strike, and the smile on his face as he did so.

His high school graduation. His last day at the orphanage, and his first day at the halfway house. His EMT certification. His firefighter’s graduation. His first day on the job. Election Day. 

His throat constricts at that last one, and he has to swallow a few times before he can breathe again.

But there are more. His medal awarding, just a newspaper clipping so far. He’d been waiting for the official pictures from His press secretary, the tall woman with the lavender hair.

There are others yet still, each frame full of an overly beaming boy and a college-aged man (and the occasional nun). Birthdays, plays. Just innocuous, unimportant things, that to a child had felt like everything.

And…

Galo’s hands pull a small frame off the wall of their own accord and bring it to him.

Ash falls onto the glass as he strokes his fingers over it.

…a picture, of a burned boy sitting in a hospital bed, smiling as a battered blond holds him with the only arm he has left.

It happens quickly. The violence, and the rage that fuels it.

Galo throws the picture to the ground with all of his strength. The frame splinters and the glass shatters, and the sound is lost as he screams at it, screams at everything, one long, guttural, feral shout-howl of rage and grief and hate and horror and despair.

It doesn’t last long; Galo isn’t a violent person by nature, after all. But the damage is done, and it shakes him to his core, as the sound devolves into choked hitches of breath.

He’s not afraid of a fight, but this isn’t the kind of fight he’s used to. This doesn’t involve standing ground. Doesn’t involve protecting anyone. It just involves…

Losing.

Because he’s already lost, hasn’t he?

He’s lost everything, including Lio.

Galo’s legs give out and he slides down the wall as his palms slide similarly up his face to tangle in his hair. As the tears come to the sound of sick sobs, he falls, and wishes they, and he, didn’t exist.

The next hour or so Galo spends on the floor, his back to the wall, his knees tucked up to his chest, tears wetting his trouser legs.

He hasn’t done this in years, but when he holds himself and sobs, it wracks through him, and his mind remembers:

It remembers all the nights alone in the orphanage, wondering who loves him now, why he’s alive, _how_ he’s alive, and whether anyone would care if he dies.

“ _I’m sorry,_ ” he whispers, _pleads_ , as his eyes get so full of tears he can’t see, though he isn’t sure to whom he’s begging, or for what. “ _I’m sorry, I’m sorry..._ ”

Or what he would even want to see if he could.

_“Mom, Dad…”_

The sounds keen out of his mouth like a cry and a prayer both, shaken loose from long ago:

_“I miss you so much.”_

* * *

He dreams of fire again that night, this time his childhood home’s conflagration. The Promare are there, rainbow triangles gleefully eating up the combustible materials with incongruously cute _om nom nom_ and _chomp_ and _yummy!_ noises.

He wakes to heat and smoke like always, the drifting tendrils curling, vine like, over his ceiling. Checking, he finds light flashing from under the door, and, curious, Galo is roused to investigate, even though he knows something’s wrong, somewhere deep inside of him. Even though his lungs tickle with particulate and he coughs lightly.

“Mom? Dad?” he calls, as every child calls, when faced with a deeply unfamiliar situation full of warning bells.

He sets his hand on the doorknob and recoils. It’s _hot_.

As he stares at his hand, the door blows off its hinges.

When he wakes again in his dream, he’s covered in scrapes and bruises, coughing heavily and his eyes sting. He’s trapped between his bed and the broken pieces of the door. Part of it is digging into his back, bruising and sharp.

“Moooom?” he calls, a pitiful thing. “Daaaaaaaad!”

He starts to sob, a child scared and hurt, but he also can’t hardly breathe, and the heat is licking at him. He sees, suddenly, the liquid flame rippling up the doorframe, and watches it consume the ceiling with equal parts dread and awe.

It’s the instinctive part of him that knows he’s already dead, that simply watches it. That if he’s going to die, he might as well get a nice show of it.

But this time, instead of a strange man stumbling into the doorway to his cries, he watches the triangles dance through the fire, making chiming, pinging noises as they do so, like they’re having _fun_.

They encourage him to become one with the fire, and when he does—when the flames crawl up his arms and become him—it takes all his pain and fear away.

He touches the door and it melts, and while it lays goo all over him, while that _hurts_ , it also doesn’t kill him. His skin repairs itself instead, and eventually the heat is just warm, rather than deadly. It whispers at him to get up, so he does.

There is suddenly sound all around him that didn’t used to be there. The guttural roar of the flames has turned to something else—something like distant voices frolicking on top of white noise static. It’s everywhere, everywhere the flame is, and the only silence he can find is in the open doorway.

It is wreathed in fire and smoke like a portal, and he knows he must go through it. There is simply nowhere else to go in this hellscape, and he knows he can’t stay here. The voices will consume him; every time his mind drifts away from the task at hand, he feels himself melding into them, and he knows if he answers that call, he won’t ever come back.

So he walks through the second floor of the house in quiet awe and fantastic detail, seeing minutia he’s never noticed before: The pattern on the wallpaper. The dust on the top of the chair rail molding that it sits above it. The smell of the glue as the wallpaper burns. The teddy bear left just behind the stairway spindles, its tiny legs hopelessly captured by flame.

As he inspects the scene through a fiery fish-eye lens, he hears the flames speak in ways he never has before in this dream. Each element, each touch, brings a sound as they consume it, one of glee and joy and nourishment, that brightens when he focuses on it. Eventually, through a hallway blazing on both sides and with rich, dark smoke pooling at the ceiling, he reaches a closed door. It’s a familiar one, but one he’s never been to in this dream. One he couldn’t have consciously remembered until this very moment, if asked.

But he recognizes it, the way the door isn’t just a smooth, flat plain, but instead has square designs in its oak surface. His soul rings in some clear, but distant way—this is deeply familiar. Looking up, he also recognizes the cheerful handicraft above the door saying _bless this union_ , a present from his parents’ wedding day.

It too, is on fire, twisted and warping, half blackened by soot. Soon, there will be no more of it. He remembers that.

He also remembers what lies behind that door. His hand reaches up and hovers by the knob, but he can’t bring himself to turn it. He can’t bring himself to _witness_ it.

It is, after all, his parents’ bedroom.

He’d seen the house, afterwards. When the investigators had brought him in to discuss what he had seen and heard. He was little, so they needed him to point it out, to walk them through it, because his verbal recitation didn’t make enough sense.

Never mind the fact that they had brought him to his parents’ bedroom despite the fact that he had never been there during the incident itself. Never mind the fact that they had shown him the charred remains of the bed, with his mother and fathers’ melted slipper soles beside it.

He had seen the crime scene pictures too, with the remains of his mother and father’s bodies in that bed. They’d ended up on the internet somehow, when he was researching the incident to figure out who his first responders had been. His story was legendary, and so everything around the incident was sacred, of a sort.

He’d closed the lid of his laptop and just stared at the wall for a long time after that. When he finally moved, it was to throw up for a good half a day.

He’d given up the hunt after that, and promptly blocked out the memory, mercifully.

Well, except for in the dreams, his mind adding it to the data with which to make nightmares.

So now, six-year-old Galo turns and, as the Promare dance in the periphery of the scene to a set of tinkling glockenspiel sounds, he sees a college-aged blond man with one arm, staggering up the stairs, disappear into his room.

He’s never seen the dream from this angle. It’s always in first person from what actually happened, and he gazes around the house like he’s exploring a VR environment.

Is this real? Does he really remember this, buried in his mind? Or is he just imagining it? …Is someone _else_ imaging it?

Is this…the _Promare’s_ memory?

In response, the flames call to him, telling him they are happy to burn and they are happy he is there with them.

And in between the crunching, eating noises that kind of sound like sped-up film of coral, he hears a _chime_.

A deep, resonant chime that grips his chest like a tolling bell too close.

Galo turns to it, but the very sound seems to ring over his body, sending the flames attached to him buzzing higher.

He gazes at his arms, enveloped in flames, in bright red and orange and even blue, the hottest flame color. He’s wreathed in it, but it feels oddly…healthy, somehow. Like a clean-burning natural-gas flame.

A ghost-like Kray runs out of the house with a similarly translucent him. He sees the way the heat wraps around him, rather than brushes off of him. The way off-color flame trails behind him, dark and pooling. Was that always there? Or had he simply never noticed?

How could he have never _noticed_?

The flames—the many Promare inhabiting this landscape like so many sparkler sparks—sing out a chime to reassure him and condense around him so tightly there’s a wind. They make him an armored breastplate like a gladiator’s, telling him they are here now, that he is safe. He will always be safe now, for that they are with him. There is no inch of him that is not superbly warm.

Anger does not rise, even though he realizes it should. This is a dream, he knows that, and so he just has those nice, fuzzy dream-emotions that wrap around him like a blanket, that are guided by something other than his conscious mind.

Galo’s not sure what he’s supposed to do now, though, that this part of the dream has run its course. Standing halfway to the stairwell now, he looks back at his parents’ room one last time, and sees—

His parents.

The ghostly, rainbow-edged form of them, soap-bubble-like, walking _through_ the door.

He sees their faces as they drift by, and though he cannot consciously remember them, he knows that this is what they really looked like. It roots him to the spot, the shiver of that realization.

As does the fact that they do not look at him. Do not see him. He calls their name, wants to run to them, but he knows that if he does, they’ll disappear and this precious moment will be gone. The flames hold him back, like the arms he cannot run to.

Across the way, hand-in-hand, the ethereal, rippling, flame-bright forms of his parents have reached his room. They peer into the open doorway, their backs twin peaks as they pause for a moment, searching.

When they see he is not there, there is a sigh of relief that goes through them, through the dream, the same way the chime reverberated before. Galo feels it to his very soul, pushing away the despair and the fear of the past few days, and even the Promare who had come to provide comfort.

His parents, their forms shimmering and waving, turn to each other. His father has glasses and a soft look in his academic eyes. His mother is tall and athletic, with big arm muscles and messy hair. Hands held like at a wedding ceremony, they gaze deeply into each other’s eyes for a time.

His father is the first to have his shoulders sink a little. His mother is the one who smiles a little, resigned. She cups his cheek tenderly and he leans into her hand.

His father draws down mother’s hand. He brings it to his mouth and kisses it reverently—on the knuckles, on the ring.

And then, suddenly wrapping each other in a tight embrace, they kiss.

They cry into that kiss. The teartracks shimmer the color of a Promare rainbow.

The flames around them rage and flicker, swirling into a maelstrom until then they both disappear, evaporating into the light when the ceiling collapses around them.

And in the aftermath, there is an echo of a man's voice:

**_Live well, son._ **

When Galo wakes, he is crying so hard he can’t see.

He cries for two straight hours on the floor, curled up with his back to the bed, babbling to himself about nothing and everything and rocking back and forth with his arms tight around himself, because there is no one else to hold him.

He hasn’t done that since he was in middle school, and all he can say about it when he is done is a shaky, broken string of curses.

Because there’s one more thing they said, in that dream. The last flourish of a long-lost letter, delivered by a woman's voice and held all these years by the flame:

**_We love you._ **


End file.
